Monday, October 23, 2006

Men Without Chests and Women Without Breasts

This morning, after greeting me “in the usual way,” Petey observed that, “the really hideous thing about the left is that it is composed of men without chests and women without breasts.”

But also as usual, he left it to me to elaborate and to try to explain what it has to do with yesterday’s post on the nature of human destiny.

Well, let’s see. Even--or especially--if you are a moonbat who hates the classical liberalism embodied in the conservative movement, you will no doubt agree that it espouses scary masculine virtues such as competition, maintaining the rule of law, standards over compassion (i.e., not changing the rules for members of designated liberal victim groups), delayed gratification, and respect for the ways of the father--that is, conserving what has been handed down by previous generations of fathers, and not just assuming in our adolescent hubris that we know better than they.

Contemporary left-liberalism, on the other hand, has come to represent the realm of maternal nurturance--compassion over standards (i.e., racial quotas), idealization of the impulses (just as a mother is delighted in the instinctual play of her child), mercy over judgment (reduced prison sentences, criminal rights, etc.), cradle-to-grave welfare, a belief that we can seduce our enemies in a feminine way and not have to defeat them with manly violence, and the notion that meaning, truth and values are all arbitrary and subject to change (which is true of the fluid world of emotions in general).

Now, I am not one of those modern space age a go-go people who imagine that gender is irrelevant to our destiny. But nor do I think that our destiny can be reduced to gender. Rather, our destiny is influenced by several archetypal factors that go into our “blueprint” and inform who we are: sex (for each sex emphasizes different divine qualities), age (i.e., season of life), intellect (not its content, but its height, depth and breadth), temperament (e.g., Jung’s useful system), caste (e.g., priest, warrior, menial/intellectual laborer, merchant, etc.), and even zodiacal type (in the archetypal sense, not the debased “predictive” variety found in newspapers and most books on the topic).

Now the feminist movement of the 1960’s and 70’s had very little to do with comprehending, much less honoring, divine femininity, but generally degraded and devalued it. In the long run, it represented nothing more or less than the flight from a temporary or at best “pseudo problem” in exchange for a real and abiding one. It largely became a vehicle for the expression of female envy, giving existentially angry and maladjusted women license to imitate the men they envied. After all, few women are less feminine than the typical NOW activist.

Nor are they masculine, however. A woman cannot actually become a man, but can only become a monstrous blending of male and female. They become “women without breasts,” except perhaps for plastic ones. (If you ever want to hear the archetypal voice of a woman without breasts, try listening for a few moments to Randi Rhodes on Air America. If you have ears to hear, you will know in an instant what Petey is talking about. Woe to her luckless child and, one assumes, luckily ex husband. Only a man with no chest at all could have survived in such a shrill atmosphere.)

(Importantly, this is not to even remotely suggest that a woman cannot develop her masculine side or a man his feminine side. What we are talking about is a complete nullification of sexual polarity, a kind of magical, self-imposed blindness, so that these critical differences are effaced.)

Because they have disassociated their own devalued femininity, these women without breasts will try to locate them elsewhere. In the deepest layers of the unconscious explored by psychoanalysis, the breast is associated with the source of life and of being itself. How could it not be? The infantile mind does not separate breast, milk, love, life, being, or mother into separate existential categories. Rather, these categories will only gradually emerge from the harmoniously mixed-up intersubjective diad of mother-baby. But not always. The primordial edenic memories of the perfect breast-paradise remain.

For some, these dreams of a non-friction life with unlimited abundance are transferred onto an inanimate object called the government, which becomes the great existential teat for all of us. It will heal us when we are sick, rescue us from hurricanes, take care of us when we’re old, educate us, and generally shield us from the vicissitudes of fate.

That giant suckling sound you hear off in the distance is the sound of Democrats on the morning of November 8th. However, Petey informs me that there are still several alternative futures implicated in the present moment, so our fate is by no means sealed. He says “watch Rove work. I regard him as a quasi-mage who can read the Signs of the Times and respond accordingly.”

I hope this is not too esoteric, but the brave new world offered to us by the left represents a reversion from our uniquely human trimorphism of mother-father-baby, to the primordial biological diad of mouth-nipple through which mammals first enter the world. These nipple-dragging leftists keep us fixated on the most primitive object of our desires, which ultimately prevents the critical evolution from static twoness to dynamic threeness.

I know, I know, but look again at what happened to the black family as a result of all the liberal meddling. Government replaced the category of fatherhood, which eventually resulted in 70% of black children being born without benefit of marriage. And for these boys without fathers to emulate and show them how to be men, another aspect of government fulfills that role: prison. For prison is none other than a belated (and now greatly exaggerated) can of whoop-ass from the missing father. The percentage of fatherless murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals is just staggering.

Or look at socialist Europe, which is populated by Men Without Chests and Women Without Breasts. No wonder they can’t reproduce.

It was C.S. Lewis who coined the phrase "men without chests." In an article entitled Wimps and Barbarians, Terrence Moore notes that while "barbarians suffer from a misdirected manliness, wimps suffer from a want of manly spirit altogether. They lack what the ancient Greeks called thumos, the part of the soul that contains the assertive passions: pugnacity, enterprise, ambition, anger. Thumos compels a man to defend proximate goods: himself, his honor, his lady, his country; as well as universal goods: truth, beauty, goodness, justice. Without thumotic men to combat the cruel, the malevolent, and the unjust, goodness and honor hardly have a chance in our precarious world."

Naturally, "Wimps make worthless watchdogs. But their failure as watchdogs or guardians has nothing to do with size or physique.... Many of today's young men seem to have no fight in them at all. Not for them to rescue damsels in distress from the barbarians. Furthermore, wimps vote. As Aristotle pointed out, to the cowardly, bravery will seem more like rashness and foolhardiness than what it really is. Hence political and social issues that require bravery for their solution elicit only hand-wringing and half-measures from the wimps. Wimps are always looking for the easy way out."

Moore ties the phenomenon of wimps and barbarians directly to the culture of divorce and the absence of male role models in boys' lives. "Half of American boys growing up do not live with their natural fathers. The sons of single mothers lack strong men to usher them into the world of responsible, adult manhood. Divorce, whether in reality or in the acrimonious rhetoric of the mother [probably without breasts--ed.], impresses upon the boy an image of the father, and therefore of all men, as being irresponsible, deceitful, immature, and often hateful or abusive towards women. For sons, the divided loyalties occasioned by divorce actually create profound doubts about their own masculinity. As the boy approaches manhood, he is plagued by subconscious questions which have no immediate resolution: 'Will I be like Dad?' 'Do I want to be like Dad?' 'What is a man supposed to do?'”

The answers for the leftist Man Without a Chest are no, no, and “act like a woman.”

Oh really? You think that bombastic Bob and polemical Pete are engaging in hyperbole?

“Maybe this masculinity thing is a bad deal, not just for women, but for us. We need to get rid of the whole idea of masculinity. It's time to abandon the claim that there are certain psychological or social traits that inherently come with being biologically male. If we can get past that, we have a chance to create a better world for men and women.”

Amazingly, in Jenson’s bizarro world, our worst social problems are not caused by an absence of real men, but by their very presence: “masculinity is dangerous for women. It leads men to seek to control ‘their’ women and define their own pleasure in that control, which leads to epidemic levels of rape and battery.”

Flatland leftist that he is, Jensen conflates the horizontal category of mere biological maleness with the vertical psycho-spiritual achievement of true manhood. And naturally, “if we are going to jettison masculinity, we have to scrap femininity along with it." We “have to stop assuming” that masculinity and femininity even matter anymore.

So there you have it. A man with no chest has climbed out of the sissypool of the left to speak out on behalf of his sisters without breasts. Let’s hand over the country to these lowbrid humans on November 7th!

37 comments:

will
said...

Ultimately, I think, men without chests are also men without hearts. For all their wimpitude, when push comes shove, the chestless/heartless breed make for the gray bureaucrats who sign off on mass executions while sipping tea.

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."

Professor Jensen sounds like the poster boy for this sort of play. Is he concerned that his proposal for changing the very roots of human behavior might have unintended consequences that can't possibly be forseen? Nope, he would just wish that his prefered world-view would also be a good one.

When Lewis wrote about "men without chests", he was railing against the educational system in England that brought about that sorry state. (Seeing [formery Great] Britain today, it's obvious that things have not gotten better - they've gotten far worse.)

They're not exactly getting any better here. Following Lewis' "Green Book", we have "Heather Has Two Mommies" And "Why Mommy is a Democrat" (a philosophical tome from which Daddy is noticeably absent). True, neither are schoolbooks (yet), but the textbooks that are there are not encouraging.

Neither is it encouraging to realize that the wide-eyed liberals and anarchists of the 60s are now - like the good Professor Jensen - happily ensconced in tenured positions at universities, where they can influence new generations of students. Two other striking examples of this lunacy are Professor William Ayers, "Distinguished Professor of Education" in Chicago (having reinvented himself from his former role as anarchist Weatherman"), and his erstwhile accomplice, Bernardine Dohrn (another former Weatherman).

Education is the key. For one thing, it passes on a country's cultural values to each new generation; for another, it passes on the values of the Western canon - Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Hobbes,.... Finally, it gives us the tools to make our way in, and even reshape, the world. Tools like logic, mathematics, science, literature, ...

I'd have to say that what passes for education in this country fails on at least three of those last.

The Moore essay is fantastic. At one point, toward the end, he observes "Boys are not compelled, indeed not allowed, to fight anymore. They cannot fight on the playground."

I have two boys, and I can't tell you how many times I have been in situations where my sons will play shoot 'em up type games with other boys, and the other moms will totally freak out and tell their spirited boys they can't play gun games. Sheesh!

They mean well, but they're sqelching that wonderful martial spirit that boys possess.

Tamara: Sounds like Moore read Gerard Jones' Killing Monsters... a book, by the way, which I recommend highly to all on the blog (including Bob and Petey, the latter of whom has probably already read it).

but look again at what happened to the black family as a result of all the liberal meddlingDaniel Patrick Moynihan predicted as much 40 years ago. in his Department of Labor report entitled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," Kay S. Hymowitz reminds us:Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts. One in particular caught his eye. Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.” In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order.

Convinced that “the Negro revolution . . . , a movement for equality as well as for liberty,” was now at risk, Moynihan wanted to make several arguments in his report. The first was empirical and would quickly become indisputable: single-parent families were on the rise in the ghetto. But other points were more speculative and sparked a partisan dispute that has lasted to this day. Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. Though black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had already introduced the idea in the 1930s, Moynihan’s argument defied conventional social-science wisdom. As he wrote later, "The work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what ‘everyone knew’: that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so."

But Moynihan went much further than merely overthrowing familiar explanations about the cause of poverty. He also described, through pages of disquieting charts and graphs, the emergence of a “tangle of pathology,” including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto—or what would come to be called underclass—behavior. Moynihan may have borrowed the term “pathology” from Kenneth Clark’s The Dark Ghetto, also published that year. But as both a descendant and a scholar of what he called “the wild Irish slums”—he had written a chapter on the poor Irish in the classic Beyond the Melting Pot—the assistant secretary of labor was no stranger to ghetto self-destruction. He knew the dangers it posed to “the basic socializing unit” of the family. And he suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of blacks, since their “matriarchal” family had the effect of abandoning men, leaving them adrift and “alienated.”

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: "a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure."

When I was in college, more years ago than I like to acknowledge, I noticed that feminists who chose a act masculine took only the negatives of masculinity (smoking cigars, swearing like troopers, etc.) and none of the positive aspects (protectiveness, providing to those in your care etc.)

I also notice that men and women who, because of their orientation, tried to mimic the opposite sex in their appearance, usually became a disgusting parody of that gender.

Depends on what you mean by "without chests." A good many lefty males suffer from gynecomastia, judging from zombie's photos of the "World Naked Bike Ride" in San Francisco on June 10. (Warning: not work-safe, not kid-safe, and definitely not safe for those who prefer the classical ideal of the human form, male or female.) Bob could write an interesting post on the compulsive need of these people to expose both their deficiencies and their excesses. They remind me of the Adamite heresy described by Augustine and Epiphanius in the 4th century. The Adamites believed that they had recovered Adam and Eve's primal innocence, hence nothing they did could be sinful. They practiced "holy nudism," rejected marriage on the grounds that it did not exist in Eden, lived in complete disregard of civil and criminal law, and took off their clothes when worshipping. Apart from that last, sound like any moonbats you know?

Tomorrow, mix and match gender traits by way of the laboratory and the genome.

Either way, Frankenpeople.

Is very dangerous, ungodly, even, to mess with the basic constituents of nature. That may have been one of the primal sins in the ancient long ago. In fact, I have to assume that it was, considering that it is a recurring theme of the modern age.

As a leftie, liberal atheist, I gotta say:A more obvious poisoning of the well, I have not seen. 'The other side is a bunch of sissies.'I've had a nose-to-nose yelling match w/a Neocon (who backed off), & faced off on a few street punks, who've promptly backed up or ran.& for a leftie, I got a mean right hook.Oh, & I don't cave easy.

will:For all their wimpitude, when push comes shove, the chestless/heartless breed make for the gray bureaucrats who sign off on mass executions while sipping tea.You should read the newspapers more often, or get out more.Or maybe you ain't heard about 'criticizing the govnmnt is helping the terrorists' or free speech zones?You got stats for that last statement, or are you blowing smoke?

Stats: Lenin and his followers and fellow travellers = 20 million dead in the Soviet Union, 65 million in the People's Republic of China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan.

Is that heartless enough for you? These same murderers that the left like to pass off as "just an alternative form of gov't"?

Bob, great post! Rush has a word for this feminization of males in America that you might appreciate: "Oprahization". It’s absolutely sickening the way that the left attempts to emasculate the male human being by introducing such science-fiction concepts as the Metrosexual, who to me is nothing more than a combination of RuPaul and Commander Data. And the feminists get into the act by writing books about how male behavior needs to be nipped in the bud in our schools, by means of “Conflict Resolution” and Ritalin. Fortunately, there are several books written in defense of boys by authors like Michael Gurion and Steve Biddulph to counteract this Oprahization. Also, as a further antidote, read any books by Robert Bly or John Eldridge.

The picture of the “monstrous blending of male and female” reminds me of Tolkien when he relates the story of how Orcs were created in The Silmarillion. It also reminds me of the hideous human-alien hybrid experiments pictured in the movie Alien Resurrection.

“For some, these dreams of a non-friction life with unlimited abundance are transferred onto an inanimate object called the government, which becomes the great existential teat for all of us. It will heal us when we are sick, rescue us from hurricanes, take care of us when we’re old, educate us, and generally shield us from the vicissitudes of fate.”

I related in a previous post about watching the horrors of Katrina in New Orleans while recovering from surgery (and being really thankful for modern technology). While I felt for the victims, I could see right away, beyond all of the harrangues and hyperventilating by reporters and Democrats, that what I was watching was a MASSIVE, MASSIVE failure of the welfare state, in a city that had implemented it to the maximum degree possible in a capitalist nation. These poor black folks had been attached to that “great existential teat” (awesome, awesome analogy Bob) for generations, and when a crisis was upon them, for which they had more than ample warning, they were rendered unable to help themselves due to their absolute dependence on the government, both before and after the hurricane hit. And the agencies, having created this dependence, absolutely failed the folks by not delivering what they could not possibly deliver; the failure was not so much in not delivering, but promising all of it in the first place. These multiple agencies tripped over each other’s feet like Keystone Kops in their efforts to deliver help, each one waiting on the other to respond, or preventing others from responding. The poor of New Orleans, with government IV tubes suddenly ripped out, were the losers.

TROLL ALERT TROLL ALERT TROLL ALERTA TROLL HAS ENTERED THE COMPOUND. REPEAT: A TROLL HAS ENTERED THE COMPOUND. ALL BOBBLEHEADS ARE INSTRUCTED TO ARM THEMSELVES WITH DIVINE KNOWLEDGE AND PROCEED TO BATTLE STATIONS TO AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FROM ON HIGH. COMMANDERS WILL, VAN, PETEY, COUSIN DUPREE AND JOAN, PLEASE REPORT TO THE BRIDGE.

tsebring,I had a good withering blast all written and aimed at ka-boom, but cousin dupree already said what needed to be said, he is a barbarian - what's the point of arguing with that? As shoprat noted about feminists who chose to act masculine, but could only manage to take the flashy negatives of masculinity (smoking cigars, swearing like troopers, etc.) and none of its positive aspects, well that applies to these chestless male feminists as well.

But as with every other leftist tactic, - they don't have it and they don't understand it but they like the public image of a particular concept, so they seize on its mearest surface appearance, and gut it of all it's true meaning - just as they did with the term Liberal - now, forerver written with a lower case "L".

And we are left arguing with only an imitation of ideas, shadow boxing with poltergeists.

It's kind of depressing, is that all there is out there for us to fight?

Yet, do not forget that it is also the men with chests who refuse absolutely to stand up for men who have a social/legal need.

Back in the late 1970's and early 1980's when we were fighting for rights for fathers who have custody of children, the feminists opposed us: The dominant "man's man" also opposed us. Both felt that starving children were better than living healthy children.

One must remember that we've ALWAYS ran with about 5% of all children being raised by a lone father: That's true as far back as we have records. OK, now we run about 11% of all children being raised by a lone father. But "Who stands opposed to making legal changes tp allow those fathers reasonable legal rights?"

The feminists and the men with chests. Hmmmm?

Herein lies the mystery: There are areas in law wherein justice, mercy and the right of children to stay alive are opposed, strongly opposed.

Where are the men with chests? They're in the same camp as the feminists, violently opposed to keeping kids alive.

So we've got a fairly large problem in this area of society. How do we get real change?

I think Ka's comment provides a good starting point for a few thoughts.

First, I like it when a person comes out and identifies their politics and religion. I find that simple courage to be very welcome, especially when one is commenting on a blog where a one's view is dissenting. For myself, I wish I could so easily encapsulate my point of view. I am a former liberal, libertarian atheist, most of whom has arrived after 25 years of ideological wanderings to a place that seems to be a little to the right of Ann Coulter. But parts of me are scattered across the ideological spectrum.

So Ka tells us that Bob's essay boils down to "the other side is sissies." In this, he is at least showing the (overly) masculine trait of responding to a perceived threat. A little hasty? Sure. Immature? A bit. But like any strong mature explanation of the sort that Bob wrote, there is an element of challenge in it. Unlike so much of what one may read around the web, it takes a distinct position, and in so doing, naturally results in some dissent.

Bob closes with "A man with no chest has climbed out of the sissypool of the left to speak out on behalf of his sisters without breasts..." This is poetry, Ka. I think you are taking it a bit too literally.

Ka defends himself against this perceived threat with some examples.

He tells of a nose-to-nose yelling match, of facing down street punks, and assures us he is no sissy. But this forum is not a boxing arena, it is a place for kicking around ideas. Ka's comment is very weak on this - and that combination of a lack of forethought combined with macho posturing is why (I think) he was quickly labeled a troll and a barbarian.

Now, if you take the time to hold off on an immediate reaction to Ka, and gather a bit more information to make a judgment with, and check out the link that he provided when he commented, you find that one of Ka's interests is Tai Chi. I enjoyed the blog, and his entries did not seem barbarian at all. Nor did they seem to me to demonstrate a lack of masculinity, with the possible exception of his mention that while he does Tai Chi, i.e. he does it in a very yang or masculine way, stomping and making noise. Personally, I cut him a little slack on that, because it does not come off as especially insecure.

This, at last, brings me to my point. We are at war, and a sizable portion of the US wants the US to lose. That sizable portion feels that America deserves to lose. And in our system, that is a real problem if the overall proportion of those people grows in relation to the rest of us.

I am all in favor of using warfare and struggle in those cases where it seems to be the most likely way to win in the long term. However, Bob did not say that men need to be free of the feminine, rightly so. The feminine here is to realize that Ka might be salvageable, and some of our countrymen like him might be salvageable. I think we have a responsibility to try and 'seduce' as many people to our point of view as we can, so that we do not end up having to kill them later in a war.

I am not the best choice to do that in this case, I suspect, because I am just one goofball trying to make a single point about carefully choosing one's enemies to conserve on ammunition. But let me try my hand anyway:

Ka, you know from the study of martial arts that styles are blends of yin and yang. You mention in your blog styles and ways of practicing those styles that are 80/20 or 60/40 blends. What does a 99/01 blend look like? Distorted, strange, ineffective, I suspect - you tell me.

Men and women both need to function with a style that matches the underlying truth of who they are. A woman who rejects femininity in her way of being is like a martial artist who rejects the idea of defending against attacks and only learns and uses offensive punches and kicks. And while that might work, as it might work to simply exhaust your opponent with 100 percent defense, neither are especially practical or effective.

I believe that Bob is arguing for striking a healthy balance of yin and yang, and nothing more. That balance will vary from person to person, and it will be a function of their body, heart and mind - not the function of a philosophy that calls one side of the spectrum 'bad.'

My hunch is that you would agree with that point.

How do we determine what a healthy balance is? We can discuss that fruitfully. How much should the gender of a person have a bearing on the optimal overall blend for them of yin and yang? We can discuss that fruitfully as well. I am willing to listen to arguments, to be educated and to be persuaded - that's why I was reading Bob's essay in the first place.

Bob paints a poetic picture of pathological extirpation of masculinity (in men) and femininity (in women) that he says is far more prevalent on the left than on the right. I think - seriously now - you have to agree that on the whole it is a valid point. Of course there are exceptions. But the left has a tradition of working to actualize the yang in women. When women averaged 95/5 Yin/Yang in this culture, this was a noble thing. But we now are seeing the damage of continuing to hammer after the nail has been driven all the way in. There's a hole in the wall! Something new and destructive emerges from continuing a constructive approach beyond its goal.

So, I say welcome Ka. The river of the Tao brought you to Bob's place and maybe there was more of a reason than you first realized.

Another Lewis (P. Wyndham Lewis) had a similar idea in his concept of the "Man of the World". In his view, such a person did not feel up to the vicissitudes of life and worked to create a protective, dumbed-down social environment that would put him on more equal terms with everyone else. Unfortunately that usually involves putting everyone else at a disadvantage, and there seems to be no end to the process once it starts...

Barbarian is not an evaluation of intelligence or the ability to balance Yin & Yang, but his ability to reason in a civil fashion, and, at least at the outset of a discussion, a predisposition to respect 'Sweetness and Light' as Matthew Arnold used to describe the high points of civilization.

I always look at a commenter’s profile & site first. ka-booms site, with its focus, its approach and its language, did nothing but reinforce my initial opinion.

For myself I'll skip the fruitless conflict resolution approach and go right to the conflict outcome - he's a barbarian AND a lit-tuhl gurlie mahn, jah!

Mark,Though it could certainly be said that Ka had cahones to come on this blog and take on intellectual heavyweights like Bob, Will, Van, etc., consider these points:

1. I don't believe that Bob's primary purpose on this blog is to "seduce" people over to his point of view; he is not a missionary. I believe he has said several times that that is not his mission; also, the very point he is making about "pathology" is that certain deviant points of view, such as nihilsm, tend to be incurable by human means. Ka may indeed be salvagable, but not by any means that any of us Bobbleheads posess.

2. If a person enters this comment space in attack mode, as Ka did, it is only logical that he can fully expect to be attacked back. I've seen the blog link; Ka seems like a thoughtful if somewhat eccentric guy, but his aggressive and arrogant comments said otherwise; and, let's face it, first impressions are often all you have to go on here. His aggressive approach unfortunately obscured any of those good points; on this blogspace, that approach will only paint a target on your back, which several of us unapologetically took aim at. Though I admire your restraint, I do not feel obligated to emulate it in this case, and from what I've seen I don't think some of my fellow Bobbleheads do, either. I reserve the right to speak freely in defense of what I believe in when it is attacked. I believe that standing up for onesself fits in with the feminization theme quite well.

3. You will notice that I used humor: i.e., the "Troll Alert", rather than a direct attack. I find that humor can have a certain disarming quality to it that direct attack does not; and it exposes weaknesses more effectively. Bob uses it often, as do folks on both sides like Rush, Ann Coulter, Kos and Franken. It is when it degenerates to the crude and personal, like Michael Moore or Michael Savage, that it is no longer worthy of a forum such as this.

In short, I think there is a great need for thicker skins in the high-stakes political climate in which we find ourselves today. Ridicule and humor have their place when they are used to mount a counter-challenge to an unorthodox or dangerous idea. Political campaigns and scientific debates use them all the time; that's what makes a democracy.

I sincerely hope nihilism, and the other pathologies Bob details with such lucidity, is *not* incurable by any human means. The day may be upon us when these deviants outnumber us, if I can be so bold as to presume that you and I are in the same 'us.' I believe there is only so much destructive nihilism that can be absorbed by a system like our nation, and our civilization.

I have read that cancer cells are being generated all the time in our bodies, and we each have some ability to neutralize these. It is only when these rogue cells get beyond the capacity of our bodies immune system that what we commonly think of 'cancer' can kill us.

The immune system of modern civilization is dealing with a virulent infection by Islamists, and this has compounded a long-suffered chronic infection by our own native nihilists. There is no way to turn cancerous cells back into liver cells. But I sure hope there is some way we can bring at least some of America to a point of sufficient sanity that they will help us fight off our death-loving enemies with all the seriousness that it will take to win.

I wrote the post to make a general point that Ka just happened to trigger. The general point is that where it is possible, it seems in our interest to try and use the understanding we have, and which Dr. Bob's essays help to foster, to illuminate the path a bit for others.

Is the author of a drive-by, ill-considered chest-beating mini-rant a good candidate for education? Truly, I see your point when you say he is not. But he did spark an idea that I felt like writing about, and I appreciate the opportunity to post it in an anonymous fashion. And I appreciate your courteous response.

Re:2Undoubtedly, blogs have a decorum that allows for the process that brings people to comment and brings people to read those comments, and benefit from them. Your point is well taken that Ka does not deserve any respect when he arrives showing none.

As far as reserving the right, I would hope you would. It was not my intention to chastise you for responding to Ka in a perfectly appropriate way under the circumstances. It's pretty clear to me now that I overplayed the use of Ka as an example.

The principle is what interests me more, because I am struggling with how to react to people who see things very differently than I do. The easy first response is to dismissive or derisive, and I think that many times, that response comes from loyalty to the truth. Some of these people *are* monsters. And reasoning with monsters is futile.

But if you raise your standards too high...at some point it is only you and the monsters. So where do you set that standard, and what do you to in response at different levels of variance?

Those that want to kill us because we are American, I want dead. Easy enough.

But what about those that think that I should be killed because America deserves to lose this war - not Iraq mind you, but the actual war we are in, the global war on islamic fascists. Do I want them dead too? In a perfect world, they would just grunt happily in their echo chambers and have no effect on the foreign policy of the US. In that world they can be ignored. But I do not think we live in that world. I think we live in a world where they are becoming more numerous. And between Islamists and their pals, the leftists, I think we are in some real jeopardy.

I wish I had been clearer. The thing is, until I sat down to write the comment, and then thought about it during the day, then read your comment, along with Van's, I did not fully realize this was what prompted posting the comment in the first place.

Re:3Yes, I did notice the humor. And I agree with your assessment of its value. The value of a thick skin is also great.

I read too many blogs, and I seldom comment, because - as you can see - pithy terse on-topic just is not my style. I observe a great many people that post idiotic things, and they are dealt with. Now and then though, I think we lose some who could benefit from the trememdous opportunity for cross-pollenization that blogs provide.

I know there are some on the left still willing to reason. And I know, with even greater certainty that people can come out of the leftist fog and find their way to shore. I know because this is something I have experienced myself.

They *can* find their way, and often when they do, it is because they saw a lighthouse. Dr. Bob's place is such a lighthouse.

You are indeed a barbarian, not a wimp.So I'm a man w/a chest now? Which is it? Which label should I wear, that should make you happy?None, I think.

will:Yeah, yeah, heard all of that nonsense before.What is it the xtian always say? Oh, rigghhtt..."they weren't w/us!"These same murderers that the left like to pass off as "just an alternative form of gov't"?You do realize that all atheists aren't communists, right?

van:For myself I'll skip the fruitless conflict resolution approach and go right to the conflict outcome - he's a barbarian AND a lit-tuhl gurlie mahn, jah!I'd advise you get a refund on that armchair psychology degree - it was a waste of money.

The point of it all?We are not all soft, weak, timid little creatures. I do apologize for my abrupt post, but I run into these needlings on a regular basis, & only being human, at some juncture I take a bit of umbrage.

My rule-of-thumb on trolls, BTW, is that you should make the effort to communicate 3 times. 3 strikes, you're out.

Tsebring:Ka seems like a thoughtful if somewhat eccentric guy, but his aggressive and arrogant comments said otherwise; and, let's face it, first impressions are often all you have to go on here.Well, you seem to be somewhat rational.Let's give this a go:Frontieres null fides.

Who is it who stood up for children and continues to stand up for children against feminist contempt for all males?

Well, it is us "whimps."

We were the ones out there taking the shots back when we custodial fathers wanted access to spousal support. Don't forget it is ME, not the "men with chests" who was called "The most dangerous man in Canada" for daring to suggest that children are better of not being abused, not going hungry and being loved.

Hmmm?

Today, some of the big fights are over the treatment of battered men and the DEMAND that all men asking for child custody are abusers.

Who is standing up and taking the shots? Who is working their butt off to stop hatred of men and of children?

Us whimps ...

Dr. Dobson for instance demands that battered men are rare and so must be ignored, even though every piece of science in existence says they are not rare and that not apying attention to them ensures child abuse as well as damage to the man.

Who is standing up? Who is in the path of the bullets coming from the feminists and the 'men with chests?"

I am behind on my Cosmic reading, thus I missed this post when it was current.

You might enjoy this anecdote from our son's middle school days...

He was on scholarship at a Friends' School. Very left and veering more so as one ascended into high school, where the lit. curriculum consisted of 3rd world or feminist or otherwise deluded "authors." It was so creepy, we took him out, scholarship or no.

But he had his Martin Luther moment in 8th grade. He witnessed several boys from his class shoving another classmate into a closet and leaning against the door, preventing him from leaving. He could hear panic in the kids' voice and so he told them to cut it out. They ignored him and he couldn't find anyone to intervene at the time.

He came home quite incensed --what kind of Quaker behavior was this?? he asked -- and proceeded to attempt to call the head of school, the middle school director, and several others to report the incident. No one was available so he took matters into his own hands...

Without naming names, he wrote out a description of the incident and then added his own thoughts about its implications for a school which preached peace and understanding. The next day he posted copies of his thesis on all the main doors of the buildings on campus.

The administration was, shall we say, miffed. They ripped the signs off and called him on the carpet. He defended his behavior and questioned that of the bullying he had wittnessed. Following the inquisition, he was pilloried by the bloody bullies AND their victim. The latter because of the shame, I presume.

However, he did get support from the upperclassmen who told him he had done the right thing. So did his history teacher (the token conservative).

Not too much later, the school called in some psychologist to have group meetings with the 8th grade boys re bullying. I think my kid slept thru them.

Today, he is a man, almost done with college. He has realized the futility of trying to keep all your fingers in the holes of the floodwall, but when he sees something egregious he still speaks up.

And he has lost faith in women...he finds them rapacious and narcissitic, spouting theories about the impossibility of being able to discern right from wrong.

Of course, so far they're all liberals except for a fundamentalist he dated one time and who said she couldn't go out with him bec. he wasn't Christian enough...whatever *that* means.

He's afraid there aren't any real women left and he is doomed to a life of intellectual monasticism.

My two cents is more factual than lyrical in nature. Of late I have had the mysterious pleasure of meeting a cashier at a store I go to that is a woman but she no bust whatsoever. No trace of a bra either but she is definitely a woman and most alluring to me. I saw her twice today at the same store and I think I went back a second time on purpose just to see her. I am spell bound, I believe she is much too young to have had breast cancer. She is very beautiful indeed and tits are not everything guys.

What About Bob?

Who spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Who is your nonlocal partner in disorganized crimethink? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!